PUTTING WORDS IN THEIR HEADS

SAC Songwriting Challenge | Week 2 | POP pitch

My brain is fully engrained in the pop’ular world of music. And I probably devour more radio than my daughter who simply laughs and tells me I play all of my music too loud.

North (Easton) and I have been doing quite a bit of songwriting together since we wrote our first song last year. And it seems more opportunities to write together are finding us. This was a week full of new songs outside of the challenge that we were working on and so decided to co-write this ‘pop’ song as well.

I had started the outline for a song about a young girl who can’t seem to get the eye of a guy she’s enamored with, but invisible to. As always, North quickly had thoughts about the melody and the direction of the lyric. And so began our back and forth of building with the song at the centre. After writing many songs together, the strength of our collaboration is finding its stride. There is much respect and admiration for what each of us brings to the process, but funnily enough North commented that how long it takes us to write a song depends on how long we battle. Our battles are good (mostly) and our battles are about writing the best possible song. Seems the two alphas in a room scenario works for us.

As was the case in writing pop specific song “I Am Words”, once we’ve arrived at what we’re going to write about, we typically develop our chorus lyric and music first with a general mapping out of where our verses could go, as in “So, what’s the situation? Who’s talking? Why? Where are we situated? What’s happened? Where do we want to go from here? What’s the mood?” Our bridges seem to be built last both lyrically and melodically. In this case, leveraging “I am words in your head” from my original lyric, led us to a slightly different song perspective allowing us to empower the girl singing it as opposed to her pining after a guy that was oblivious to her affections. North wasn’t so enamoured with this scenario. He didn’t like the idea of putting the girl in this diminished role, but I explained “hey, most girls have walked in those shoes at some point in time”. Right? Regardless – I lost that battle. I expect we have about 6 hours of hard writing into this song and North likely has 4 – 5 hours of production in.

Available time is one of the biggest challenges in life. And this week the onslaught of writing met with my having laryngitis. Voice gone. Not ideal. But a deadline is a deadline. We had hoped to have someone else sing the song – but that didn’t work out. And knowing that it’s best to have a female sing a song intended for a female voice – well, I jumped in (to the fire apparently) at the 11th hour to sing it. Not my finest hour (just under before my voice caved). However, North had initially recorded his version of what we’d arrived at for style and approach and sent to me for reference to do mine along with the instrumental track. But I’m not posting that.Here’s North’s version of the song where he sings “I’m the girl” which was the original lyric rather than the updated line “I’m the one” – and quite certainly we know that a girl, North is not.

“I Am Words” is finished, but not.

A tough week but a happy result. Listen here – with lyrics in the track info.

- rbt

NE Version | https://soundcloud.com/rosannebakerthornley/i-am-words-v2/s-oQ4pP